This haunting devotional painting depicts Saint Anne, who was particularly venerated in Germany, with the Virgin and the Child. The motif of the sleeping infant, foreshadowing Christ’s death, was probably inspired by Giovanni Bellini, whose work Dürer admired during his sojourn in Venice. Anne’s hand on her daughter's shoulder takes on a consolatory meaning, and her distant gaze suggests a premonition of Christ's Passion. The model for Anne was Dürer's wife, Agnes, studied in a preparatory drawing signed and dated 1519 (Albertina, Vienna). Although this panel’s date and monogram were added later, the picture was likely painted in that year.

Catalogue Entry

This well preserved and haunting picture is a mature work by the greatest German artist of the Renaissance. The subject, referred to in German as Anna selbdritt (literally "Anne in a group of three"), gained widespread popularity in the second half of the fifteenth century due to the flourishing cult of Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. This painting departs from the traditional formulas, in which Anne is shown seated, supporting the Christ Child on one knee and the Virgin Mary on the other, or, if standing, holding them in her arms. Dürer has placed Anne higher in the picture field, and the breadth of her headdress gives her a certain monumentality, but all the figures are depicted in natural proportion. By cropping them to half length and bust length, Dürer obviates compositional problems commonly associated with Anna selbdritt groups.

In most representations of Anna selbdritt Christ holds a symbol such as an apple (Christ’s atonement for original sin) or grapes (Eucharistic wine/Christ’s blood). The motif of the sleeping infant, foreshadowing his death, was probably inspired by the work of Giovanni Bellini, which Dürer knew from his trips to Venice. The blue tones in the shadows of the infant’s face create a pallor which emphasizes the allusion to death. Anne’s hand on her daughter's shoulder takes on a consolatory meaning, and her distant gaze suggests a premonition of Christ's Passion. By these means Dürer has greatly enhanced the meditational effectiveness of the image.

The picture was probably commissioned by the Nuremberg patrician Leonhard Tucher (1487–1568), and it remained with the Tucher family until 1628. In 1630, the great Dürer collector Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria, purchased the painting as part of a sustained acquisition campaign that brought numerous important works by Dürer to Munich. Yet this happened only after he had rejected the work as a copy upon initial inspection in 1628, and even the entry in the 1630 inventory of the electoral Kammergalerie contains a remark doubting whether the work was entirely by Dürer's hand. The painting remained in the electoral, then royal, Bavarian collections until 1852, when, apparently demoted to the status of a copy, it was included in a substantial sale of paintings from Schloss Schleißheim and bought by the sculptor and collector Joseph Otto Entres.

Shown in Munich in 1854, after it had been cleaned, it was hailed in the press as a sensational rediscovery. However, one laudatory article in the Deutsches Kunstblatt by the art historian Ernst Förster prompted a vehement rebuttal by Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1854), director of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, who firmly rejected Dürer’s authorship. The attribution issues were complicated by the known existence of several copies of this composition, one of which also had been included in the 1852 Schleißheim sale. The dispute between Waagen and Förster, carried out in subsequent issues of the Kunstblatt, long remained the definitive record of the work, which, after its 1867 sale by Entres, spent the next several decades in the collection of Ivan Kuris in Odessa, less accessible to Dürer scholarship.

A renewed assessment began upon the painting’s appearance in Dresden, where Ivan Kuris’s widow brought it about 1909. Max J. Friedländer offered his full endorsement of authenticity to the dealer Joseph Duveen, who took the painting to the United States in 1911. For many decades to follow, Dürer’s authorship was unanimously accepted, until 2002, when Claus Grimm maintained on formal and technical grounds that the painting is an accomplished workshop production based on preparatory drawings by Dürer.

However, the MMA work is entirely typical of Dürer’s style and technique in the years around 1520. Contrary to previous statements in the literature, is also very well preserved. Saint Anne’s eyes show Dürer’s typical placement of catchlights opposite a minute, crisp reflection along the inner rim of the iris. Also, the shadows of Anne’s headdress and Mary’s dress were worked up with the heel or side of the painter’s hand—a modeling technique that has been observed on other works by Dürer. Numerous close correspondences in style, motifs, and technique to contemporary paintings, drawings, and prints by the artist make an attribution to Dürer himself all but certain. However, recent technical examination suggests that the date and monogram on the picture were added later. Nevertheless, a date of 1519 was documented by the time of Elector Maximilian’s acquisition in 1630. There is also a surviving study by Dürer—a brush drawing of Saint Anne on gray prepared paper, for which the artist's wife, Agnes, sat as the model—signed and dated 1519 (Albertina, Vienna). Similarities to this and numerous works dating around that time indicate that the MMA picture dates from that year.

[2012; adapted from Waterman 2013]

Technical Notes

The support is a linden panel with the grain oriented horizontally. Past intervention makes it impossible to discern the number of boards that compose the panel. There are several splits in the support along the wood grain in the middle third of the panel. At some point prior to entering the collection, the panel was thinned to approximately .5 centimeters and attached to a support composed of a walnut veneer and a three-layer plywood sheet; mahogany strips were attached to the perimeter of the whole composite. A mahogany cradle probably dating to the early twentieth century is attached to the verso.

A barbe along all four edges indicates that the composition retains its original dimensions and that an engaged frame was in place when the white ground preparation was applied. Along the very edge of the perimeter, there are fragments of linear indentations, which may be the remnants of an original score line along the border between the paint surface and a frame. Wide beveling in the surface plane along the entire perimeter may have been imposed when the preparation layers were pared down to sharpen the division between the pane and the engaged frame.

The painting is signed with an ad monogram set beneath the date "1519." Although a similar double-stroke style of monogram is seen in other paintings associated with Dürer, neither the monogram nor the date can be original because the finely divided pigments used are characteristic of a post-1850 industrial manufacturing process.

The paint layers are generally in good condition. A few tiny paint losses are scattered throughout. Residues of a dark toning layer, removed in the nineteenth century after the painting left the royal Bavarian collection at Schleißheim, can be seen under high magnification. They manifest as minute, round, brown black deposits lodged in and along the craquelure. With the exception of a few strokes concealing slight abrasion in the child’s flesh, restoration is limited to the small losses and the abrasion in the background.

The paint layers were built up using small strokes that feather the colors into each other and often follow the form of the object depicted. This is especially noticeable in the shadows on the faces. In the shadows of Saint Anne’s drapery the glazes were applied with the side of a hand, and similar marks can be seen in the red lake glazes on Mary’s dress. Many bright red fibers are present in the passages containing red lake because the pigment was manufactured from red-dyed wool or silk cloth. The background has a brownish cast that is possibly due to a degradation commonly seen in paint layers composed of copper-containing green pigments. It is likely that the background was originally a more brilliant, saturated green. Infrared reflectography revealed a few faint contour lines of underdrawing in the hands. They were apparently done with a dry material and are positioned slightly differently from the final painted forms.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300–1550," April 8–June 22, 1986, no. 144.

References

Lukas Friedrich Behaim. Letter to Augustin Haimbl. November 20/30, 1627 [published in Ref. Bayersdorfer 1910], states that he now has access to a painting that Haimbl had seen in copy at Behaim's house in Nuremburg, probably this picture.

Joseph Heller. Das Leben une die Werke Albrecht Dürer's. Vol. 2, part 1, Bamberg, 1827, p. 195, probably based on Mannlich [see Ref. 1810], lists it as a work by Dürer at Schleissheim, and the smaller version (p. 197) also at Schleissheim as a copy after him.

G[ustav]. F[riedrich]. Waagen. "Zeitung." Deutsches Kunstblatt 5 (June 8, 1854), p. 203, attacks Förster's attribution [see Ref. Förster 1854, April 27] to Dürer on the basis of style and execution, and calls it a copy from the second half of the sixteenth century; mentions a rubbed transfer [now lost] in a brown medium in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, which shows the same composition in reverse, but is more gracefully drawn than the MMA work, noting also that in the transfer the figures are life-size, but are much smaller in the painting; believes the Berlin transfer to have been made after a lost original, larger than the MMA painting, by Dürer.

Ernst Förster. "Die heilige Anna Albrecht Dürer's." Deutsches Kunstblatt 5 (July 13, 1854), pp. 251–52 [reprinted in Neue Münchener Zeitung (July 26, 1854), pp. 1924–25], rebuts Waagen's assertion [see Ref. 1854, June 8] that the work is not by Dürer, stating that he has obtained the measurements of the figures in the Berlin rubbing and that they match those of the MMA picture exactly.

Moriz Thausing. Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst. Leipzig, 1876, pp. 384–85, cautions that in doubting Dürer's authorship, Waagen [see Ref. 1854] and Mündler [according to Thausing, an "oral opinion," that probably refers to Ref. Mündler 1854] failed to take into account the general decline in the quality of Dürer's style during this period.

Charles Ephrussi. Albert Dürer et ses dessins. Paris, 1882, p. 173, states that a 1519 sketch of the head of Saint Anne (Albertina, Vienna) is a study for this picture; erroneously states that Prestel made a print after this work.

F. v. Reber. Kurfürst Maximilian I. von Bayern als Gemäldesammler. Munich, 1892, pp. 17, 44, publishes the inventory of Maximilian I, claiming that it dates from 1628 [this is either erroneous dating, as Maximilian acquired the MMA painting in 1630, or the inventory was begun in 1628 and added to later]; incorrectly assumes it came from the Imhoff collection.

Lina Eckenstein. Albrecht Dürer. London, [1902], pp. 203, 259, mentions that the painting is in Odessa, but misidentifies it as the "Virgin and Child of the Pink".

Gustav Pauli. "Die Bildnisse von Dürers Gattin." Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, n.s., 26 (1915), p. 76, ill. p. 73 (detail), ascribes it to Dürer, including it in a study of a number of paintings in which Dürer used his wife Agnes as a model.

Hans Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat. Kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke Albrecht Dürers. part 1, Vol. 2, Basel, 1937, pp. 137–38, no. 736, ill. p. 298, as by Dürer, but state that Deschler's restoration so severely compromised the picture that all that is left of Dürer's work are composition and type.

Harry B. Wehle and Margaretta Salinger. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Early Flemish, Dutch and German Paintings. New York, 1947, pp. 186–88, ill., erroneously as transferred to canvas.

Art Treasures of the Metropolitan: A Selection from the European and Asiatic Collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1952, p. 227, no. 103, colorpl. 103.

Claus Grimm. Meister oder Schüler?: Berühmte Werke auf dem Prüfstand. Stuttgart, 2002, pp. 52, 54, figs. 84–85, 87 (color, overall and details), attributes it to the Dürer workshop, possibly to George Pencz, because of the high viscosity of the paint, the lack of emphasis on line, the Manneristic shadows and highlights, the emphasis on modeling with light, the plastic quality of the whole, the uncharacteristic form of the monogram and date, and the unanatomical quality of the Child's head.

Viktor Mikhalchenko and Oleg Sivirin. Da budet pravda: istoriia dvorianskogo roda Kurisov, vozrozhdenie iz zabveniia [transliterated Russian title, which in English translates as "Let There be Truth: History of the Noble Family of Kuris, Rescue from Oblivion"]. Odessa, 2005, pp. 101 (no. 12), 290, provides ownership history between Entres and Duveen, by way of the Kuris family [see Ex collections] and reprints parts of catalogues for 1884 and 1888 Odessa exhibitions which included this picture.

Peter Klein. Letter to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. April 3, 2006, reports that the support is made of linden wood, later glued to plywood.